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Zkuq on 12 August 2023
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Jizz_Beard_thePirate said:
Zkuq said:

So, I got a budget Mini-ITX PC for some living room fun in the spring, and now I'm kind of arriving at the conclusion that yes, a budget SSD can be not only non-ideal but actually really bad. I got a 500 GB Kingston NV2 since it was cheap for what it offerred, and initially I was happy enough with it. However, over the months, I've been experience some random slowdowns that last for up to dozens of seconds at once, then perhaps the situation eases for a few seconds, and then it gets really bad again, and so forth. When it's bad, you can't basically do absolutely anything on the PC. For example, simply opening the Start menu can take dozens of seconds, and sometimes even the cursor stops moving. At some point the situation might get remedied entirely, and usually if I can start up a game, there are no issues whatsoever.

Anyway, recently I finally investigated the situation a bit, and it turns out that disk utilization is at exactly 100 % whenever the slowdowns occur, and then we're talking about sub-1 MB/s speeds. No wonder it's slow... When it's not terrible, it's at least several hundreds of megabytes per second, and it's supposedly capable of more, but I haven't benchmarked it properly. Not sure if a faulty disk or just bad, but some online discussions indicate that it gets really poor performance very quickly when its gets filled up, and not necessarily even very much. Gonna have to investigate further, but I kind of suspect things will improve if I uninstall some games... That, and there's some other things I might be able to try still (such as a firmware upgrade). Not at all happy though! I'm probably going to assume that cheap SSDs can be absolutely crippling, even worse than HDDs, if things get really bad (not that I was going to cheap out too much on my new desktop probably later this year).

Reading the reviews, I wouldn't have used it as an OS drive

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/kingston-nv2-ssd

The ssd that you put the OS into is put under significant strain, especially on Windows as Windows loves it's background tasks and updates and etc. From the review, it sounds like you can either get QLC or TLC as well as the choice of a good controller and a mediocre controller. Since it's Dramless, if you got the double whammy combo with no way to tell until after you got it, yea it can certainly perform worse than hard drives. The OS SSD should always be top spec reliable SSD like a Samsung or Western Digital. Back in the day, a 970 would have been perfect or today, SN850. Getting cheap SSDs for secondary or third drives is perfectly fine however since those won't get hammered like the OS drive does.

You can also dual boot into a fresh OS by creating a custom petition on your SSD tho and see if a fresh OS will solve your issues. If it does, then it's likely something is hogging your SSD.

Yeah, not a great choice in any way, but I figure that it'll just be slower, not outright unusable (assuming it's not simply faulty). It's not a PC whose performance I care that much about, so I figure pretty much any SSD that's not going to break too soon will do - but perhaps I was wrong... Definitely not going to repeat the mistake though (unless it turns out that the problematic SSD is faulty after all).

Chazore said:
Zkuq said:

Wait, Titan Quest II is coming? Awesome! Now I hope they don't screw it up, since the devs of the original are (quite successfully) doing other things now. Sounds like there's a good chance it's going to be good, at the very least. It's been a long time since there's been much to look forward to in terms of new games, but the situation's been getting pretty good recently. I'm really surprised.

Aye, but it says "coming soon", which could mean this yr or possibly early next year, they haven't exactly given any date or month to run with.

Afaik it is being created by the dev team behind SpellForce 3, so I've got some confidence they can pull it off. Just gotta hope they don't pull a Diablo 4 and slap in stupid shit like a season pass/battlepass or a cash shop. I want this ARPG to be authentic like Grim Dawn and the original TQ.

Luckily I have patience (and too much to play anyway, especially with Cities: Skylines II coming soon). I'm not too worried about a season pass of whatever with this one, but of course I could be wrong, but instead, my worry is how well suited the team is for a game like Titan Quest. I haven't played Spellforce, but it sounds like it's quite (but not totally) different.